The ability of a segment of a glass sphere to magnify whatever is placed before it was known around the year 1000, when the spherical segment was called a reading stone, essentially what today we might term a frameless magnifying glass or plain glass paperweight.

Adjectives formed using -less often form nouns by the addition of -ness (-lessness), but generally do not form nouns by the addition of other noun-forming endings. The suffix -lessness means "absence".